The Feminist Spectator ruminates on theatre, performance, film, and television, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, other identities and overlaps, and our common humanity. It addresses how the arts shape and reflect our lives; how they participate in civic conversations; and how they serve as a vehicle for social change and a platform for pleasure. It’s accessible to anyone committed to the arts’ political meanings.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

After I posted on Hung, I watched a few more episodes, catching up with a recent
story-line (Episode 27, “What’s Going on Downstairs or Don’t Eat Prince Eric“)
about Ray’s encounters with Kyla (Jamie Clayton), the transgender client Lenore
introduces to his services without telling Ray that Kyla, who presents as a
woman, is “actually” a man.

The debate about Kyla is set in the context of
Ray’s apparent aversion to having sex with men, which Tanya’s new worker, the
happily omi-sexual Jason, is willing to do.
When Charlie, Tanya's erstwhile lover and fellow pimp, suggests that joining forces with Jason
and his wife, Sandy, will allow Tanya and Ray to expand their services, Ray
grudgingly agrees to bring the much younger man on board.

Later in the episode, the revelation that Kyla is transgendered
turns the tables on Ray and forces him to examine his narrow-mindedness.

The story-line presents a rather lame, liberal
excursion into transgendered experience.
Ray’s dismay when he learns that Kyla is trans seems calculated to
address mainstream viewers’ presumed discomfort.

But when Ray accompanies Kyla to her high school
reunion—and paid handsomely, even though he insists that sex is out of the
question—he sees his date through her former classmates’ eyes and realizes his bigotry.

At the affair, Kyla aims to pass as a woman, and
successfully mystifies former friends who have no idea who she is. Then, in a double reveal, just as a table
full of men recognizes Ray as a local if faded basketball hero, they also
recognize Kyla as Dan, an old classmate they remember with derision and
righteous ridicule for his new gender performance.

Kyla is humiliated and plans to flee, but Ray
comes to her rescue, chivalrously suggesting that they dance as the others
leer. Kyla is appeased and
comforted. Ray’s voiceover suggests that
he’s become too old not to let himself and others be what they are, whatever that
may be, securing the liberal message of tolerance for the episode’s end.

Obviously, this isn’t the treatment transgender
people deserve from a show that otherwise takes a more progressive view of
women’s sexuality. Given how much the
producers seem to know about feminism, I’d expect them to present a more complicated
story about the show’s first trans client.
Because the story proceeds from Ray’s perspective, his anxiety about
homosex determines his reaction to Kyla, and steers the viewers’ response.

At the same time, the episode is one of the first
in the series to underscore that Tanya and Ray are middle-aged. Charlie reminds Ray that however large his dick, it won’t last forever, startling
Ray with this foreshadowing of his inevitable loss of potency.

And when Tanya and Ray try to work with Jason and
Sandy, they’re both chagrined that they can’t follow the younger couple’s pop
culture references. The show’s attention
to their ages increased my affection for the characters. After all, how often do explicitly middle-aged
characters talk about generational issues on television?

On the next episode (#28, “I, Sandee or This Sex. Which Is.
Not One.”), Jessica (Anne Heche) continues to find herself excited by
Tanya’s instruction at the Wellness Center.
Although her presence there throws Tanya and Ray into fits of anxiety,
because they continue to think they can hide Ray’s sexual activities from his
former wife, Jessica is taken with the theory and the practice of embracing her
own sexuality.

She enters Tanya’s office clutching a book,
breathlessly trying to say the author’s name, which Tanya explains is “Irigaray.” The book is the famous French feminist’s This Sex Which is Not One. I think this is the first time I’ve seen
French feminist theory happily referenced on television (let alone used to
suggest how women might sexually empower themselves). Jessica can’t quite follow Irigaray’s ideas,
but Tanya is delighted by her enthusiasm and eagerness. The two women bond over the book, hugging one
another thankfully.

This level of insight into the post-structuralist
critique of sexuality and gender should have allowed the producers to handle
the trans story-line more gracefully.
But I continue to revel in Tanya’s feminist sex pedagogy and her
intellectual savvy, which more than outweighs her dismal business acumen.

About Me

I'm a writer who loves going to the theatre and the movies, watching television, reading novels, and then thinking about what all of it means. I teach at Princeton University, in the English Department and in the Lewis Center for the Arts Theatre Program. I also direct Princeton's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I believe in quality writing about the arts and the importance of the arts to social life. I also believe the arts do and should give us pleasure and hope, as well as inspiring our creativity and a more expansive sense of what our lives together can be.